HUYE MOUNTAIN

ORGANIC DECAF

You wouldn't know it's decaf unless we tell you! A stunning coffee that packs rich sweet flavours. With the organic certified Sparkling Water decaffeination method, the flavours remain almost untouched. Expect a balanced espresso with great body, chocolate ganache and red grape flavours. Add milk and you get a sweet marshmallow taste.

Located on the slopes of Huye Mountain in the Huye District in Southern Rwanda, this private washing station is owned by David Rubanzangabo. David is something of a philanthropist, and cares deeplyabout the smallholder farmers who deliver their coffee to his station. Since it was established in 2011, Huye receives cherry deliveries from around 1,330 producers during harvest season, who deliver their freshly picked coffee cherries to 26 collecting stations around the Huye community, where a truck visits daily to collect coffee during harvest season. Typically, a small holding in the district is just a quarter of a hectare in size, with around 200 trees. The yield is about 4kg of cherry per tree, so eachfarm only produces roughly 2 bags of coffee. It is entirely bourbon, which, coupled with analtitude ranging from 1,600 to 2,300 metres above sea level, brings about lots of complexity and great flavours in the cup.

The processing is based on washing the coffee with a set up that is typical throughout East Africa. The freshly delivered coffee is inspected to ensure only good red and ripe cherries are included. Then it is put into the receiving tank where inferior floatersare removed. The denser, high quality cherries are then pulped in a Penagos discpulper before entering a concrete fermentation tank where they are held for 12 to 15 hours. It is a dry fermentation process meaning that extra water is not added. After this the mucilage is loose enough to be washed away and the tank is then filled withwater and the coffee turned with a large wooden paddle before being drained. This process is repeated a further 4 times to ensure the coffee is clean before being channelled through water (when further floaters are removed) and is then transportedto raised beds for drying. Initial drainage drying is under shade as the coffee could be damaged atthis point if it is exposed to too much heat. Then it is taken to the drying tables in the sunshinewhere the beans are diligently sorted by hand to remove defects, and turned it regularly. This can take between 15 to 20 days.

The parchment coffee then goes to storage to be held for two months while it conditions (the evening of moisture content) before being trucked to the mill of Rwanda Trading Company, in Kigali. Here the parchmentis milled away and any further defects are removed using light sorting machines. Gravity sorting machinesare also used to remove broken beans and foreign bodies before the coffee is finally packed into 60kg bags (lined with Grain Pro) and containerised for export. The coffee is trucked to either Dar es Salaam in Tanzania or Mombasa in Kenya, from where it is shipped to us.

THE SPARKLING WATER DECAFFEINATION PROCESS

This process was first discovered by a scientist called Kurt Zosel at the Max Planck Institute for Coal Research in 1967 as he was looking at new ways of separating mixtures of substances. In 1988, a German decaffeination company called CR3 developed this process for decaffeination whereby natural carbon dioxide (which comes from prehistoric underground lakes) is combined with water to create ‘sub-critical’ conditions which creates a highly solvent substance for caffeine in coffee. It is a gentle, natural and organically certified process and the good caffeine selectivity of the carbon dioxide guarantees a high retention level of other coffee components which contribute to taste and aroma.